An authoritative history of art history from its medieval origins to its modern predicaments
In this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the ...evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original and accessible account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline.
The book shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance-Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari-measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times. The major art historians of the modern era, however-Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Ernst Gombrich-struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism, leading to the current predicaments of the discipline.
Combining erudition with clarity, this book makes a landmark contribution to the understanding of art history.
Was ist »moderne Kunst«? Aus der Perspektive des taiwanischen Kunstdiskurses gestellt, macht diese Frage Diskrepanzen in der Erzählung der Kunstgeschichte der Moderne sichtbar, die von Europa aus ...weitestgehend unbeachtet bleiben. Anhand von taiwanischen kunstkritischen Texten seit den 1950er Jahren - die hier das erste Mal in deutscher Übersetzung vorgelegt werden - analysiert Lisa Bauer-Zhao das Verständnis von moderner Kunst, dessen Veränderung sowie die zugehörige Begriffsgeschichte in Taiwan. Im Kontext der Globalisierung der Kunstwelt beleuchtet sie die aufscheinenden Problemfelder und eröffnet eine globale Perspektive auf die Diskussion um moderne Kunst.
Was sagen geschichtliche Bilder über die Praxis des Enthauptens aus? Katrin Weleda arbeitet mittels sorgfältiger Quellenanalyse Paradigmen der Enthauptung heraus und etabliert diese als exekutives, ...experimentelles und diskursives Phänomen. Zentraler Handlungsakt ist dabei die Enthauptung Ludwigs XVI. durch die Guillotine, welche sich in unterschiedliche Bildwerdungen einschreibt. Neben Bildern fließen auch medizinische Quellen und die Diskursanalyse der psychoanalytischen Lesart Sigmund Freuds im Hinblick auf das Medusenhaupt in die Forschungsergebnisse ein - was aus ästhetischem Blickwinkel die macht- und wissenspolitischen Dimensionen der Enthauptung offenlegt.
An eminent literary biographer and critic shows how
poetry enriched the art of two representative English Romantic
painters In Visionary and Dreamer , David Cecil
evokes the century of the ...poet-painter, when painting drew much of
its inspiration from imaginative literature. Samuel Palmer
(1805-1881), an unworldly visionary, obscure in his lifetime but
now a recognized master, and Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), the
Pre-Raphaelite daydreamer, once revered as a great painter but
later admired chiefly for his work in applied art, emerge as
artists who turned to their own inner lives to interpret
Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats.
Majismo, a cultural phenomenon that embodied the popular aesthetic in Spain from the second half of the eighteenth century, served as a vehicle to “regain” Spanish heritage. As expressed ...in visual representations of popular types participating in traditional customs and wearing garments viewed as historically Spanish, majismo conferred on Spanish “citizens” the pictorial ideal of a shared national character.
In Framing Majismo, Tara Zanardi explores nobles’ fascination with and appropriation of the practices and types associated with majismo, as well as how this connection cultivated the formation of an elite Spanish identity in the late 1700s and aided the Bourbons’ objective to fashion themselves as the legitimate rulers of Spain. In particular, the book considers artistic and literary representations of the majo and the maja , purportedly native types who embodied and performed uniquely Spanish characteristics. Such visual examples of majismo emerge as critical and contentious sites for navigating eighteenth-century conceptions of gender, national character, and noble identity. Zanardi also examines how these bodies were contrasted with those regarded as “foreign,” finding that “foreign” and “national” bodies were frequently described and depicted in similar ways. She isolates and uncovers the nuances of bodily representation, ultimately showing how the body and the emergent nation were mutually constructed at a critical historical moment for both.
Die zeitgenössische Ikonographie queeren männlichen Begehrens ist das Produkt einer Schichtung und Sedimentierung vergangener Konzeptionen von Geschlecht und Sexualität. Nicholas Maniu analysiert ...ebendiese wechselhafte Diskursgeschichte von tradierter und devianter Männlichkeit sowie (Homo-)Sexualität. Ausgehend von der Gedankenfigur des Palimpsests legt er die zwischen Oppression und Emanzipation oszillierende Diskursivierung queerer Männlichkeit dar: Von der Päderastie über die Sodomie bis hin zur Pathologisierung verfolgen die Geister der Vergangenheit den homosexuellen Mann bis heute und prägen unweigerlich seine Bilder.
Participatory art practices allow members of an audience to actively contribute to the creation of art. Annemarie Kok provides a detailed analysis and explanation of the use of participatory ...strategies in art in the so-called long sixties (starting around 1958 and ending around 1974) in Western Europe. Drawing on extensive archival materials and with the help of the toolbox of the actor-network theory, she maps out the various actors of three case studies of participatory projects by John Dugger and David Medalla, Piotr Kowalski, and telewissen, all of which were part of documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972).
